J&W Minix 890GX-USB3 review

It's hard to call what a good or bad layout is for a mini-ITX board, but as far as our time with J&W's Minix 890GX-USB3 goes, it was very easy to build with. Incidentally, it's similar to the Asus M4A88T-I Deluxe, although with some subtle differences. These include the use of the 890GX chipset and SB850 Southbridge, instead of the 880G chipset and more basic SB710 Southbridge of the older Asus board.

We found the SATA ports, power sockets and fan pin-outs of the Minix all easily accessible near the boards edges, with only the front-panel audio pin-out likely to give users some stress as it's nestled between rear I/O and Northbridge heatsink.

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J&W follows a growing trend of using DDR3 SODIMMs instead of full size DIMM sockets, which means an extra purchase instead of reusing old hardware. You're also pretty much limited to to a maximum of 1,333MHz for now, but that’s hardly slow, and the SODIMM sockets mean that there’s more room to cram in other features.

As it is J&W has had to opt to use the underside for the mini PCI-Express wireless/bluetooth combo card, which then plugs into (the provided) tiny, laptop-esq adapters for the aerials. These are routed to the rear I/O where they screw in via a clever little notch in the PCB. Pedants might complain this is not as neat at integrating it onto the PCB itself, but the upside is that this flexibility is ideal for modders who want to route the ugly plastic antenna out the way.

This Minix also manages a full-width 16x PCI Express slot, unlike the J&W Minix 780G board we reviewed two years ago, which only had a 4x slot.

This cute little 17cm square motherboard is absolutely jam-packed with features from PCI-Express to HDMI and High-Definition to 65W full AMD CPU support. Could this be the ultimate low power, ultra small form factor home theatre motherboard?